Curiosity Wins: Session Recap: Key Takeaways from Kiri Masters at Commerce Media Brand Summit 2025

2026, CMBS. Keynote Presentation: Curiosity Wins: Leading When Shopping Changes Forever

Announcer: Alright, our next keynote presentation presenter who I'll bring up is gonna talk about one of my favorite topics in just professional in terms of professional qualities that of which is curiosity. So curiosity wins leading when shopper, when shopping changes forever. Please join me in welcoming retail media, industry analyst, retail media, breakfast club, curri, masters.

Thank you.

Kiri Masters, Retail Media Industry Analyst, Retail Media Breakfast Club: Thank you.

All right, Memphis, Tennessee, 1916. This is what it was like to do your grocery shopping back then. So you'd walk into a store and you would hand your shopping list over to a clerk standing behind the counter, and the clerk would run off and fetch the items on your list that you wanted. He would grab the flour, scoop it out for you, weigh it, he'd grab the apples that you wanted.

Some of the good ones would also toss in some of the bruised ones too, that he needed to move, and that was shopping. You waited in line, you took what was given to you, and at the end of the month, you would pay your household's credit account with the store. Now, a young man named Clarence Saunders, who was a grocery wholesaler, he observed all of this and he thought there has to be a better way.

People come into the store, they already know what they want. Why can't they pick these items up themselves? So at great expense, he invents a now familiar layout. A store with aisles that you walk through and shelves that you pick items off price tags so you know how much something's gonna cost rather than haggling for it at the end.

Clarence Saunders names his new store, Piggly Wiggly. Now the rest of the grocery industry thinks that Clarence Saunders is insane, not just for the silly name of the store. But for the very concept of customers waiting on themselves, like servants, they mock him and they call it a fad, but of course, shoppers love it and competitors copy it.

They rip out all of their counters and they fire all the clerks. And so the strategy lesson that we can learn from that is shoppers will never, ever want someone picking their grocery items for them ever again. No, of course not. The clerks are back, we call them Instacart or DoorDash. The real lesson to take away here is that it looks strange.

It wasn't what people were asking for, and it threatened the status quo, but that is how all revolutions in retail first begin in order for there to be lasting change. In consumer behavior, there are five conditions that need to be present. Pain technology, frictionlessness, trust, and economics. Piggly Wiggly past all five.

The pain was in the long wait at the counter. The high prices and retailers were crushed by labor heavy operations. The technology that Clarence Saunders brought in helped to resolve a lot of these pain points. It was frictionless in that the behavior change was pretty small. You had to pick up a basket, you had to carry your groceries home with you at the end, but it was well worth it.

Trust the clerks were the gatekeepers. And when they were gone, people had a much more transparent shopping experience. They felt savvy and in control and economics. This was a vastly more profitable way to run a store. And Clarence passed those cost savings onto customers so that everyone won at once across history.

These five forces show up every time a shift sticks, and when they do, it stops being a fad and it just becomes the way that we do things. Which leads us to today where we're talking about AI enabled shopping, agent commerce, and there's a bit of health healthy skepticism about what that all. Really means after all, chat.

GBT just killed their instant checkout capability last week. Boy, that was fast. Do we delete the strategy decks now in all? It is probably a good thing that this has all come back down to earth because we do not need full agentic to feel the impacts in our industry of commerce media. We just need to look at the change that is already happening.

With consumers using AI to make their decisions and choose which retailer they're going to buy from, well before they even walk into a store or go to a retailer site. That is the change that we're talking about today, because when behavior shifts, media shifts, it's last month I was in a bit of a rut. A hair rut.

Oh my gosh. I've just been doing the same thing with my hair for years and years. Never really changing it up. A little bit bored, but not willing to go to the effort of doing anything new. And one day my hair dryer blows up and I'm like, this is a sign. I'm gonna shake things up. I'm getting a new hairstyling tool.

What should I get? So I go to my new friend chat, GPT, and we start hashing it out. And chat. TPT knows my requirements. It gives me three good options, narrow it down to two options, one option, the shark glossy. Now I'm here with you today. It's a happy ending. My hair has never looked better, but was also a happy ending for Best Buy where I bought the glossy.

Let's retrace my steps. I do all of my consideration in chat GPT by the time I get to Best buy.com. I am on a one skew buying mission. My journey on Best buy.com is PDP Checkout. That's it. 60 seconds. Their analytics team probably thought that I was a bot. This is probably getting your brain ticking about.

What this means for commerce media, but was this experience a one-off? Let's run this through those same five tests. Pain, if you step back and look objectively at the e-commerce shopping experience that we have today, sucks. There's like an ocean of products. They all look the same. Fake reviews, 12 different tabs so you can compare price and shipping times and return policies.

We've normalized insanity, and that's why over half of consumers today have already used AI to make a buying decision to reduce the cognitive load. Number two, tech. The technology that exists today is good for certain shopping missions. Gift research, narrowing down option narrowing down options.

We are away, further away from the fully agent shopping path than we were before, but the technology is already narrowing the funnel. Frictionlessness people don't adopt new technology just because it exists. They adopt new technology because it slides into everyday life. We don't want another headset.

We don't want a NFT wallet. This time we're using a tech A device that is right there in our pocket and it turns out when it's in your pocket, you even use it in the store as well. A lot of consumers did last Thanksgiving. It's sliding into our everyday life trust. Now trust is an interesting thing.

I don't personally like the idea of the US government. Reading my chat, GPT chats, but it has also at the same time become an indispensable companion for us. Our relationship with AI has moved through three stages very quickly. Stage one, the intern, you gave it a job, you watch what it did. It was useful to save you time, stage two, as AI remembers more about us.

It's more of a companion, someone that we go to ask for advice. Stage three is the frontier. We are telling our AI assistance, our goals, our dreams, our budgets, and when you trust something with that level of intimate details, you trust it with your choices. And finally, economics. This is a part that is also a little hazy right now.

How will these LLMs make money? Is it through ads? Is it through subscriptions? This is a, this is unfolding right now, but history shows us when the consumer gets a better deal, whether that is pricing, whether that is assortment, the economics get figured out on the backend. Sometimes that means that economic engine needs to shift and the incumbent isn't willing to shift their economic engine.

This time, retailers are building their own onsite chat assistance. They're figuring out how to integrate with offsite chat assistance. Why would they do that? They recognize that discovery is escaping the retailer site, and this time maybe they are prepared to disrupt themselves. So if consumers increasingly lean on AI to shape choices, and this is before any fully agentic scenario comes along, then the place where retail media the place where discovery happens shifts, and that means a shift for retail media.

You all know in this room, retail media comes in three fun flavors. Onsite retail media, offsite retail media, and in store. Let's talk about what happens to each of these with an AI shaped shopping journey. So stage one, part one, onsite retail media. So if consumers get to, are using AI early in their shopping journey to shape their decisions, they arrive on a retailer.com later in their shopping journey.

They browse fewer pages. They spend less time navigating the surfaces that onsite retail media lives on. Now, this doesn't mean that sponsored product ads disappear. We still have them in Rufuss, but there is less inventory available for these types of ads. Now the second challenge is the obvious one, that these LMS are launching their own ad businesses.

Like chart, GPT, and it's still very early days there, but this could sensibly provide some kind of limit to, to onsite retail media as brands look to spend where consumers are hanging out offsite retail media. This is the value proposition of offsite retail media. Hey, I've got that audience data that you wanted.

Yeah, this is good stuff, man. This is gonna get your at attributed sales. So high, pure uncut, first party audience data, totally deterministic, scarcity, unique audience signals, and a closed loop that is the promise of offsite retail media. But there are a couple of challenges to offsite. The first to scarcity.

These LLMs are seeing so much of our upstream shopping interest, our what we're considering, our cross retailer evaluation, even what perch, what transactions may have occurred after we clicked out of the chat. So if an LLM were to launch its own. Offsite audience extension network. That would be a pretty interesting data set for brands to advertise against, and it might threaten that scarcity premium that retailers have enjoyed for a while.

The second challenge is to the unique view of the customer. So if customers are spending less time on a retailer's site or app, navigating. Sending all these upstream behavioral signals to the retailer, the inputs that feed offsite start to thin out less behavioral events, less context about that. Very special and unique audience.

Retailers still manage to hold onto very defensible data assets. There is all the. All the transactions in the store. That's gonna be very difficult for AI to disrupt all the loyalty program information. These are defensible assets. The question is, do retailers protect those as a moat or use them as a platform to build on later?

We'll get into that a little bit more. And number three, in-store retail media. This is the most defensible one right out of the gate. LLMs can't. Replicate physical context, the fact that they're right there next to a product being sold. And so in an AI shaped shopping world, this might the store becomes more important, not less.

I realize I, I might sound like a bit of a retail media dor right now, but I wanna be clear, this isn't a funeral for retail media. It's a reset. This dis, this disruption, it feels like a threat. But what if it's actually paving the way, clearing the ground for something even better? AI doesn't destroy retail media, but perhaps it ushers in a more collaborative environment for brands and retailers to collaborate and new media products that are fit for a shorter, sharper shopping journey.

So let's have a look at some of what these might be. Number one, leaning into pre retail brand building moments. So I just talked about how if offsite gets weaker, offsite will get weaker if it stays in its current form, especially at the top of the funnel where AI is starting to intercept more dista, more discovery and consideration, but it gets stronger if retailers and commerce media networks can work together, pairing their retail signals.

With broader retail, with broader media reach so that brands can reach these likely buyers earlier in their shopping journey on CTV, on social, in apps, in ride sharing environments. And so that's also the opportunity for brands, not just to build awareness, but to shape consideration before the shopping journey Narrows.

Number two, collaborative bidding and collaborative ad buys. Collaborative bidding isn't new, but it is a model whose appeals strengthens in the future. Both the brand and the retailer buy into the same offsite moment together, and so this is interestingly what the approach is in the chat. GPT adds pilot Target specifically has been talking about how their round de media partners.

Are the ones whose products are being shown in the ads inside chat, GPT. So this seems to be an opportunity, again for brands and retailers to work together, leveraging the retailer's data signals and the brand's ability to be right there in the conversation. Number three, extending that two page shopping journey.

If the shopping journey continues to constrict on a retailer.com, then growth has to come from extending the value of that transaction. This is where things like post-purchase offers, programmatic sampling, gifting becomes more important. They create trial, cross sell, and future purchase behavior after that initial decision has already been made.

And number four, in store and experiential, one of the safer bets. This obviously includes stores, but also the real world ride sharing hotel networks, airline media, and other environments where people are in motion and closer to action. As more shopping journeys get compressed online, these formats become more valuable because they put brands into lived contexts that feel harder for AI to absorb or replace.

If you wanna get a copy of the slides, you can go to this QR link and give me some feedback as well. But let's go back to Memphis. In 1916, shoppers didn't ask the self-service grocery. It looked strange. The industry dismissed it, but Piggly Wiggly one with a system that was more transparent and efficient, and that's the pattern.

The disruption begins before the final form takes shape. Tomorrow has never happened before. We don't need to predict the future perfectly to begin to act on it right now. We just need to pay attention to what is already changing and to be curious about what that means. Thank you.

Announcer: Thank

Kiri Masters, Retail Media Industry Analyst, Retail Media Breakfast Club: you. Thanks. Yeah, thank you.